The story
The Musée Granet stands in a seventeenth-century former priory of the Knights of Malta in Aix-en-Provence, and it carries the name of François-Marius Granet, a local painter who left the town his own work and collection in the 1840s. For a long time it was a fine old provincial museum with one glaring absence.
Aix's most famous son is Paul Cézanne, who worked all his life in and around the town, yet for decades the museum owned almost nothing by him. That has slowly been repaired, and Cézanne now has rooms of his own here, small paintings and watercolours shown near the streets and hills he painted. The Planque bequest adds a private collector's line from Cézanne through to Giacometti, Klee and Dubuffet.
Older galleries hold Rembrandt, Ingres and Provençal painting, but most visitors climb the stairs for Cézanne, home again in his own city.
